Composite Creatures Page 14

  Names lend significance to things, meaning more to the giver than to the receiver. To me, I’m just “me”, but to everyone else I’m a foreign body with a face and a feel. They say my name and hear its song. And you can’t shake it. You might strive against it your whole life, shortening it or changing it completely. Or you might love your name. You might have hated it in childhood but as an adult you embrace it in its weirdness or hide within its insipidness. A name can conjure anonymity, too.

  It’s the same with animals. I don’t know if they named each other in the wild; I doubt it. It’d be smell or markings that set them apart. But when we give an animal a name and repeat it to them day in and day out, we’re giving them something to respond to. They might not understand “identity” as we do but when you call their name and they come running, they must know that they’re needed, and they’re needed by you. They run to you, in love or in servitude, it doesn’t matter, and it’s never obvious which it might be.

  But what about us? What happens to us when we decide on a special name?

  It was me that chose the name Nut, and I named her after the way she’d curl around and into herself, cut with ripples through her fur like a walnut. It started off as a bit of a joke, a code name for her between Art and I, but it stuck. It became a far less clinical name for us to use with the curtains drawn. Even when she stretched out to near half a metre long, she still looked to me like a Nut. Maybe I’d have felt different about her collapse if she hadn’t had a name at all.

  On finding Nut cold and still, Art had bolted back downstairs on Bambi-legs to call Easton Grove’s emergency number while I’d stayed with her, trying frantically to remember my training; check her airways, listen for a heartbeat, feel for breath.

  Nut was stretched out on her side as if leaping, her paws contracted inwards as if pulling the shape of her into a protective round. I rubbed her sides vigorously to bring life back whilst also trying not to recoil at her rigid muscles, the stiffened skin. It wasn’t like touching Nut at all, it was touching something wrong, something alien. A terrifyingly real doll, stuffed inside Nut’s membrane.

  From the far end of the tunnel, I could hear Art on the phone and shouting up at me to check her mouth for a foreign body. Pulling my sleeves over my hands, I tried clumsily to turn her head, but her neck was unbending, locked back in a tight arc. I tried to bring her back by saying her name over and over, as if she’d hear me and come galloping from sleep just for another lick across my knuckles.

  This is why all the material tells us not to give names. It means we can’t call them back when it’s time for them to die. Lest we forget, Easton Grove’s ethos is the art of self-preservation.

  I have to give them credit, the staff at the Grove are militant.

  After hanging up, Art scaled the steps and in one silky motion lifted Nut like a serving platter and carried her to the car in his arms. Without a word, he climbed into the back seat with Nut across his lap. I slipped into the driver’s seat, my hands shaking on the steering wheel. My mind blank, I had no idea how to start. I couldn’t connect.

  A hand gripped my shoulder. “Turn the key. I can’t drive. We need to go.”

  All the way to the Grove I couldn’t look away from the road, and every few minutes was convinced that I could see creatures darting from the dark to cast themselves beneath the wheels. I couldn’t have stopped for them anyway and whenever I remembered to breathe, the air tasted bitter like medication.

  Four staff in white coats were waiting for us at reception, and next to them stood a metal gurney, like one of those stainless-steel trolleys tea ladies used to wheel around office buildings, only longer. A man with a red tie took Nut from Art and laid her on the tray. A flock of white coats swooped around us, each applying his or her own instrument to Nut like synchronised swimmers. One consultant stepped forward out of nowhere and offered us milky tea, her voice soft and slow. I noticed that she was wearing a lot of make-up, badly concealing dark half-moons under her eyes. Her face looked sticky. I was still standing in the waiting area when the tea arrived, steaming, in a bone china teacup painted with miniature pink posies.

  By now it was near midnight, and the other members in the waiting area all seemed to be in a similar state of shock. A man in a leather jacket opposite us was twitching his head left and right, his hand squeezing his thigh in short sharp bursts. A few seats along from him a middle-aged woman in a tired-looking brown suit spent the entire time staring at the ceiling. She’d taken her shoes off, and was repeatedly running her hands through her hair, giving her the look of someone that had spent time hanging upside down. Above our heads, the ceiling was painted with the most ridiculous caricatures of birds that I’d ever seen. All the wings were stunted, and their long necks twisted in ways which weren’t natural. Some were almost tied in knots. It made me feel sick to look at it.

  Art was sitting with his head in his hands, trying to massage sobriety into his scalp. But what frustrated me most was the slow, floating walk of the staff passing through as if they had all the time in the world.

  It felt all too familiar even with distance, the standing and sitting dead. But the time before, that waiting room was dark, with threadbare curtains and chairs backed with sackcloth. A bowl of scentless potpourri on a coffee table. A magazine from three years before, with “The Greying: Pollution’s Wife, and Our Inescapable Fate?” written across the cover in bold black. A dark wood door to the old hospital chapel, abandoned and forgotten.

  That night Aubrey was there, squeezing my hand a little harder each time I tried to let go, and working hard to meet my eyes whenever they looked up. I was desperately cutting myself off because as soon as our faces met she peeled me open. She would say with those eyes, “I know what you’re feeling, I understand”, but she didn’t know. Not all of it. That if it hadn’t been for her, maybe I’d have noticed what was happening with Mum before she was already half-gone. And I could have stopped it. I could have bought Mum more time.

  But after Mum’s death I was still lost in Aubrey, I needed the warm cocoon of her skin, and I curled up into her like a snail in an old shell, disappearing completely. That day, Aubrey was my voice, answering for me and calling me back whenever I started to sink. She pointed at the dotted lines I needed to mark to claim Mum’s personal effects, and she fought a fight I hadn’t the stomach for when it came to the advanced donations – extracting the entirety of the bone marrow for storage. While I sat scanning the same words on the pages over and over, I heard her flat out “No,” and then further away, “She doesn’t want it. She needs to move on.”

  But I did sign the paperwork in the end, and that was the confirmation Aubrey stuffed in the shoebox, later. The staff must have snuck the form into a pile of other things, desperate to move the whole thing on with as little fuss as possible. I don’t know what I’d have done at the time, if I’d known what I was giving away. It was a different time then. Mum was what Mum said, and did and made. She wasn’t something you could grow in a jar. And that’s just how I pictured it; faceless men in white coats and latex gloves growing a stomach or a kidney just because they could. Making it pulse and dance in a vat to see how long it twitched after they’d stopped feeding it. Mum’s parts would be born predisposed with an appetite for peat smoke, whisky, turps, and with fingers itching to hold a brush, to plunge into paint and smear dye.

  It was such early days then, for all this.

  How things change. Back in the waiting room surrounded by Grove veterans, I’d have taken any of their hearts, livers or tracts to piece together Nut, if it would end with the three of us going home together. I didn’t care from where the parts were sourced – Nut had always been worth more than the sum of her components.

  It took forty-five minutes before the same tired-looking consultant returned and invited us into a private consultation room. Once we were in there, she dragged her chair closer to us as if she knew us well. Art leaned forward as if he knew her too. God, he looked terrible.

 
; “I’m sorry, Fia isn’t on call tonight so I’m stepping in. I hope that’s OK?” The consultant’s name tag read “Zoe”. She seemed familiar, but I didn’t think I’d had an appointment with her before. Perhaps she was one of the consultants assessing us during the early interactions?

  Her voice was soft. “So firstly, it’s awake, so don’t worry, you’ve done nothing wrong.” She smiled, one hand on my wrist and the other on Art’s arm. She spoke the next part very slowly. “These things happen sometimes, and I wanted you to know that neither of you did anything wrong.”

  But would Nut be OK? Zoe hadn’t said explicitly that she’d be OK. If she wasn’t going to be alright, we must have done something wrong. It’s cause and effect. Art spoke up.

  “What happened, then? Is there something physically wrong with her? It?”

  Zoe squinted and ran her tongue along the edge of her teeth. It only lasted a second before she switched to a smile, shrugging her shoulders in a way that struck me as inappropriately casual.

  “Not necessarily. We’re looking for the cause now, so we’re going to keep it here for a while. Best guess is some kind of seizure; hence the spasms and rigidity. It can seem like a body isn’t breathing at a time like this, when really it is. But the source of the seizure we don’t know yet. It could be a fault with the biology, true, or it could be something else entirely. We’ll look into it. It might be that if we find there’s some flaw we can’t fix, we’ll switch it for another. Another ovum organi that won’t be at risk.”

  Switch her? Nut was ours. Made for us. How could they consider replacing her just like that? And if Nut reacted so violently, did that mean there was something wrong with us? I looked to Art for reassurance, a sign he felt differently, but he was lost in thought.

  I sat forward on my chair and braced my shield. “But she’s been fine – not acting ill at all. I’d have seen if something wasn’t right, I know I would have.”

  Zoe gave another irritatingly apathetic shrug. “It’s sometimes the case that non-human matter hides its weakness if perceiving threat. It might be that it was sick all along.”

  Did she think I wouldn’t have noticed this? I knew Nut. For starters, three simple reasons why this couldn’t be; one, that for this to be true, Nut would have to consider us as predators, despite us being her only contact with a living world. Two, that Nut would have to understand her own illness and the sense of consequence to come from it if discovered. And three, that this meant she was pretending in order to survive, and that she could deliberately manipulate her own behaviour to manipulate ours in turn. Each of these meant that Nut was a thinking, feeling being, and this wasn’t what Easton Grove had prepared us for.

  Next to me, Art shook his head furiously. “But how the hell did this happen? How didn’t you realise that it had a flaw at the beginning? It’s fucking substandard.”

  That was it, turn it against her. Fight slander with slander. Besides, he was right. As part of the relationship with the Grove you offer up your trust to them completely. To give us Nut, a real living creature as a promise of our future, and then miss something in her physiology as vital as this? It beggared belief. It wasn’t just jeopardising our mental wellbeing but our physical health too. Imagine what would have been if this had happened when we hadn’t been there to check on her?

  I reached for Art’s hand and squeezed it. It was cold and clammy. “Thank God,” he said, “that this happened sooner rather than later.”

  “Sometimes these things can’t be detected in pup stage, and anomalies occur as they grow,” Zoe nodded. “We’ll do everything we can to save your ovum organi, but only if it’s viable.”

  Zoe told us that they’d keep Nut in for a week or so to monitor her in quarantine. She assured us that we could visit in the evenings between 5pm and 8pm if we wanted an in-person update, but there wouldn’t be much to see.

  It was around 3am by the time we were free to go, but I wanted to see Nut before we started the drive back. Zoe showed us to the quarantine tank and then scuttled off back to pass some notes to reception. Nut was up and trotting about as if nothing had happened, pacing the length of her incubator with long strides and investigating each glass corner with her twitching nose.

  This was the first time I’d seen Nut properly out of the loft, and in such stark light she looked magnificent. It was the only word for it. Her body was this full moon, round and bountiful, coated in thick, fluffy fur the colour of storm clouds. Her ears no longer stuck out like handles on a cup, and in fact had grown very little while the rest of her had swelled. Four paws, wide and hefty, gripped a green fleece, each digit capped by a long, black claw. Tubes trailed around her chest, roping through to a white box which flashed with red numbers, as if Nut was the power source for an engine. And her blue eyes – they looked at everything, drinking the light.

  Before we left, Art made one last trip to the men’s room while I stayed with Nut, mouthing her name through the layers of glass. She either heard me moving or caught sight of my hand on the window and came plodding over, lifting her frame onto her hind legs and pressing her paws against the glass. She knew me, and while she’d seemed happy enough in her tank before, she now pawed at the glass restlessly, agitated that she couldn’t break through the barrier.

  Of course, this was the other side of the coin. Not giving Nut her name would perhaps have protected her from us, too. I watched her blood ooze through a loop of plastic and pressed my fingers to my wrist. Was I feeling what she felt, on the inside? Was her heart thumping, just like mine was?

  I owed it to Nut to visit her every evening after work. Art came with me the first couple of days, standing silently by my side, not sure what to say. But once he was assured that Nut was comfortable and there being no change in her status he chose not to come again.

  At first, the receptionist had looked at me kindly and patted my hand when I checked in. She even made sure I knew how to get home when I left in the late hours. But as the days went on she spoke to me less, and then began to greet me tentatively, as if I really shouldn’t be there but she didn’t quite know how to tell me to stop. I’d brought Art’s fleece from the loft, and now it lay scrunched up and unused at one end of the incubator, Nut having kicked it to the side. She’d look out for me visiting, and when she saw me open the door to quarantine she’d roll over and spread a wide paw on the glass, showing me her life line, heart line, head line. I’d lift my hand to meet hers, and repeat her name to comfort us both. Nut was always silent, but I knew she was glad I was there.

  Each time I visited, Grove staff would repeatedly follow me into Nut’s room to tell me that it was fine to go home, they’d update me if there was any change. One night, near the end of visiting hours, a pale faced consultant came in and tried to schedule me in for a genetic counselling session. I wasn’t scheduled to have another one for months so I told her I was fine, I’d wait. By the way she watched my face I could tell she thought I was avoiding her, but the truth was I just hadn’t the time, and if Nut was going to need extra attention when she came home I’d have even less of it to waste talking. She didn’t insist.

  Someone at the Grove must’ve been in touch with Stokers, because they were far better about my being distracted than I’d expected. I even made a few stupid mistakes when punching in numbers. Markus – my manager – pulled me into his office to let me know that if I needed time off for extra appointments I could take the time off in lieu, an out of the ordinary generous offer from him. As I left, he called out my name, and I looked over my shoulder to see him attempt an awkward wink. “Great things happening for you soon, kid.” It was disturbing.

  It took thirteen days for the clinic to say they’d run all the diagnostics they could and couldn’t find anything wrong with Nut. She appeared to be the picture of health, still viable, and the consultant made sure to tell us that while she’d been in the clinic’s care she’d gained “a meaty two and a half kilograms”.

  Before we could bring her home, we were to come
into the clinic together that weekend for a scheduled recap session on her care and be given instructions for how to monitor her in the weeks ahead. Art and I sat in the consultation room, hands clasped. Even though I found the idea of a “care recap” session incredibly patronising, I was so eager to get her home that I had forgotten to wear my usual Easton Grove armour. In fact, I was happy to accept every critical blow sent my way if it meant I could take Nut with us when we left.

  To my surprise the consultant that joined us was the same Zoe we’d met on the night Nut was admitted, though this time she was almost unrecognisable. She was wearing a cast of make-up and a sunshine yellow tea-dress under her tweed blazer. I wondered if the colour was somehow supposed to help put me at ease. She pulled out some sheets of paper from the printer and scanned them slowly.

  “It looks like a few temporary changes are in order but nothing too severe. I’m contracted to ask, though, if you’ve reconsidered the ovum organi in-patient option? I can see you turned it down during your early phases, citing…” Zoe looked at us under lowered brows, “financial reasons. So it’s not part of your current fee, but just in case circumstances had changed I thought I’d mention it.”

  Biting my tongue, I let out a long, deep breath. “Our circumstances are the same.”

  Zoe nodded, one hand raised. “That’s fine, I’m just obliged to ask. Sometimes people find the funds later – inheritances, family assistance, that sort of thing – and decide that letting us take over maintenance is the easiest option. Out of sight, out of mind, and all of that. And the option is always there for you, in case anything changes.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Giving the paperwork a quick scan, I could see that most of it was a record of Nut’s vital statistics; weight, length, blood type. The last page was all bullet points, each one a short line or two of instruction. Zoe tapped her fingers on the paper.

  “You’ll have to keep a closer eye on your ovum organi for a couple of weeks. I understand it has the run of your roof space at the moment? It’s too much. It needs to be in more confined quarters, still with space to pace of course. Maintenance will be far easier this way. Do you have another secluded space or annex that you can doctor?”